“It’s like, we worked so hard to get careers beyond it, to get to this stage, and now we’re being dragged back again. … It’s harder to do comedy now anyway: we’re older, we’ve become the Establishment we took the piss out of.”

“To an exclusive circle of independent filmmakers who know how much his collages of sound and musical refinement added to their movies from the late seventies to the early nineties, his name is still invoked with an affection verging on awe.”

“Now, with 20% of 2.3 million war veterans coping with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the US, the engineering of traumatic memories now is more than a philosophical curiosity [or conceit of a film], but a medical priority. A definitive study published early this year has now claimed memory adjustment from the domain of fiction: Researchers were able to modify the distant recollections of fear in mice, opening way to novel PTSD therapeutics in the future.”

“I was doing things blatantly that Mormons were not supposed to do. Members of the church are asked not to see R-rated movies and here I was making R-rated movies – spending most of my days crafting them. At some point you hold up these two different ideas of yourself and choose between them.”

After a 30-year career in Arabic film, TV and theater, Jihad Abdo could barely go out in public in Syria without being followed by fans. Then, as civil war broke out, he fell afoul of the Assad regime and fled. He wound up as yet another out-of-work actor in L.A. – until he happened to meet (of all people) Werner Herzog.

“It’s not that I resent the male filmmakers – I love all of them – but there’s something that women are doing that we don’t get to know enough about. It’s always a surprise when a woman filmmaker does come out and we get a feminine vision.”

“For years, the two established Spanish-language media companies — Univision Communications and NBCUniversal’s Telemundo — have dominated the space. But with more than $2.5 billion in annual advertising revenue up for grabs, Latino media has become one of the hottest and most competitive corners of the industry.”

Christopher Hawthorne: “By refusing to budge on its construction timeline, the academy is doubling down on the least-promising elements of the design. Sure, some refinements might smooth out some of its more obvious wrinkles. What they won’t do is salvage the design as a whole.”

Artists becoming more faithful to their galleries, dealers more committed to nurturing and developing artists’ careers, collectors better at respecting the rules, and China’s museum boom have combined to dramatically change the art landscape in the past few years.

“Cinema has no trouble evoking a world that exists beyond the borders of the film frame. Tom Sutcliffe, in his book Watching, describes the moment when the vast spacecraft whooshes into view during the opening shot of Star Wars as the revelation of the “unseen off-screen”. Most theatre struggles in my experience to conjure an equivalent sense of expanse.”

“The CSO on Monday stopped selling tickets to the high-profile series in response to a letter from the city of Denver warning that the events could run afoul of regulations forbidding marijuana consumption ‘openly and publicly in a manner that endangers others.’

Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul won multiple awards in 2013 for his documentary about a Mexican-American folk-rocker who unknowingly became a star in South Africa. Stockholm police say no foul play is suspected in Bendjelloul’s death.

Known for creating images melding humans and machines in a style he called “biomechanical”, Giger was primarily a painter and sculptor. Yet he reached millions of people worldwide through his designs for the films Dune, Prometheus, and Alien, for which he won an Oscar.

“It has been a deliberately slow, painstaking process, but 18 months after Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon was vandalised with quick drying and theoretically indelible graffiti ink, Tate Modern has revealed the successful results of one of its most difficult restoration projects.”

“French publishers seem to have assumed that the market in the French-speaking world [beyond the hexagon] would never develop, so they’ve done little to explore its potential. … Paris imports talent and exports books, but neither trade names nor rights.”

“One centers on the Paris Picasso Museum, where renovations have dragged for five years amid accusations of mismanagement, labor problems and clashes between the artist’s family and the French government. The other is about the fate of a Left Bank studio where Picasso lived and worked for 19 years, and painted his famed anti-war opus “Guernica” in 1937.”

Their 2004 break-up announcement “was sort of half-hearted”, says Marsha Genensky of medieval music’s superstar girl group. “Really what we were doing was going from over-frenetic to reasonable.” But after another decade – and what will total 30 years together when they disband for good in 2016 – the four women are ready for other things. (includes preview of new album)

It is “the age of the start-up,” and “American entrepreneurship is plummeting.” We are witnessing the Cambrian Explosion of apps and the mass extinction of apps. These are the glory days of risk, and we are taking fewer risks than ever.

“With its copyright on the diaries of Anne Frank approaching expiration in many countries by 2016, the [Anne Frank Foundation] commissioned what it hopes will be a permanent production that can travel to other countries.” Controversy has ensued, of course – including rivalry between the Swiss-based Foundation and the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, where the play has premiered.